Talking Real Money

Famed Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen is often quoted as saying “A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you’re talking real money.”

It’s fitting, then, that it was in Congress’ Dirksen Building that recent hearings were held regarding waste in Federal real property – an issue Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) calls a “sleepy, non-invigorating area of government that is costing the American public billions.”

That quote came at a May 24 hearing dubbed “Federal Real Property: Real Waste in Need of Real Reform.” During the hearing, Mark Goldstein, Director of Physical Infrastructure for the Government Accountability Office (GAO) was asked where work in real property “falls short.”

“Collecting real property data has been quite sketchy,” Goldstein said. He noted that there are “holes” in the gathering and reporting of real property data, with a lack of validation at administrative levels. Goldstein called for “more controls” on the collection and reporting of data. For more information on that hearing, see the story “Senate Hearing Tackles Data, Leasing, Backlogs” in this issue.

For organizations that are used to measuring performance parameters, it’s a bit easier to fill in the holes of real property data. In a separate hearing on June 12, this one on expanding Federal employee teleworking eligibility, USPTO Director Jon Dudas noted that his organization saved $1.5 million in rent per year in one facility alone by introducing a work-at-home program. Read more about that hearing in the article titled “Teleworking Testimony Reveals Real Property Benefits.”

So at least one Federal organization has good news about disposing of unneeded real property assets. The real question, however, is what the government as a whole can hope to save by shedding inventory that’s not mission-critical.

That question should have been answered to some extent by a recent report to Congress by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). OMB was tasked by Congress to list the top 100 properties eligible for sale in the Federal inventory. The report actually raises more questions than it answers.

For example, the government draws a distinction between “excess” and “surplus” inventory. “Excess” means not mission-critical. “Surplus” means not mission-critical and not necessary elsewhere in the government. Our media contacts acknowledged that OMB did subsequently clarify this, but it seems logically inconsistent to report more “surplus” inventory than “excess” using the definitions in the report. Yet that’s what several agencies reported to OMB – including the GSA, which is supposed to be the final arbiter of what excess agency property is deemed surplus to any government needs. For more, read the article “OMB Presents Puzzling Real Property Findings to Congress” in this issue.

The report would also seemingly acknowledge use limitations with the current Federal Real Property Profile (FRPP) database for decision support analytics. OMB discusses the FRPP’s relationship to their Performance Assessment Tool (PAT) as a possibility, but the report does not indicate that the FRPP data was used to prepare the top 100 list.

Moreover, agencies have informally reported receiving traditional “data calls” for their excess, surplus and disposal lists within just a few days of OMB’s published report. The FRPP (and the PAT) should offer some long term promise, but without substantial attention to and audits of data quality as GAO suggests, the FRPP could remain an outlier to meaningful budget analyses and business decision support.

It’s a shame that real property is seen as a “sleepy, non-invigorating issue,” as Senator Coburn rightly put it. But that’s because real property should not be thought of as land and buildings. That’s what got us to this point to begin with.

Ultimately, this issue is about money. Better budgeting. Reduced waste. Greater fiscal responsibility. It’s about the decisions government makes, and the data that supports those decisions.

Until we get a better handle on data – collecting it, reporting it, and acting on it – the Federal government will continue to find itself spending billions of dollars a year needlessly.

And as we now know, “a billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you’re talking real money.”


David Baxa
President and CEO
VISTA